Democracy as Fetish

“A combination of conceptual and philosophical analysis and insights from decades of fieldwork, Cintron deftly moves between registers of abstraction and the particularities of everyday struggles to map liberal democracy’s many incoherencies.”

—Caitlin Frances Bruce The Quarterly Journal of Speech

“Democracy as Fetish is necessary reading for today. Cintron demonstrates democracy’s fetishization in contemporary theorizing and guides readers through a new framework with the radical potential to explain the political maelström we live in. Cintron wildly blends fieldwork, theory, and textual analysis, constructing what reads like lively dialogue between conversationalists who are excited and invested and who care. Democracy as Fetish will stick with you long after you finish the final pages. Its ideas will return to you in random moments, you will mention it in conversation, and you will recommend it many times over to colleagues and acquaintances.”

—Sara McKinnon, coeditor of Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method

“As theorists and critics, we should welcome books that call us to question the ideas and ideals that motivate our scholarship and, more specifically, the way we employ foundational concepts in the study of rhetoric and philosophy. Ralph Cintron’s Democracy as Fetish is one such book.”

—Sara L. McKinnon Philosophy and Rhetoric

Ralph Cintron is Associate Professor of English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of the Everyday and coeditor of Culture, Catastrophe, and Rhetoric: The Texture of Political Action.